World Wide Wabs

A few quick glimpses from wandering around St Petersburg, Russia, in late August this year.

Statue of Peter the Great, immortalised in world literature by Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, an epic poem about man against the elements. Peter the First envisioned a new coastal capital for the Russian empire… built on a swamp…that would be frozen for a good chunk of the year. Apparently when his engineers told him that this swamp would be completely untenable for building for many months at a time, he said something to the effect of “Well you’d better work faster then”.

Old men playing chess on Nevsky Prospect.

Young men dancing in front of the Hermitage Museum. Other youths around them were practising stunt bike and skateboard tricks.

A boy peers at the eternal flame memorial at Field of Mars for those who died in the Bolshevik Revolution. Right after I took this photo he spat into the flame and scampered away!

On a bus along Nevsky Prospect.

Life never quite returned to normal for the aristocrats after the revolution, it seems. Nowadays they can be found at various tourist sites around town, posing for photos with visitors for a fee.